| As She Climbed Across the Table | |
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First edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Jonathan Lethem |
| Cover artist | Jacket design by David J. High |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel, science fiction |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | February 17, 1997 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 212 pp (first edition, hardcover) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-385-48517-4 (first edition, hardcover) |
| OCLC Number | 35145971 |
| Dewey Decimal | 813/.54 20 |
| LC Classification | PS3562.E8544 A9 1997 |
| Preceded by | The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye |
| Followed by | Girl in Landscape |
As She Climbed Across the Table is a 1997 novel by the American writer Jonathan Lethem. This satirical science fiction story is set on the campus of fictional Beauchamp University in Northern California. Particle physicist Alice Coombs rooms with Philip Engstrand, an anthropologist researching conflicts between and within disciplines. Their relationship drives the romantic aspect of this story.[1]
Contents |
Lack is an emptiness created in a particle collider. Professor Soft theorized that the experiment would replicate the big bang and opened a wormhole to a microscopic universe. Dr. Soft theorized that this wormhole would close shortly after it was created but the new universe clung to reality. The wormhole however is not accompanied by any events to indicate it is a physical object and so it was named Lack. The only reason the team knows Lack exist is some particles enter the space where lack should be and fail to appear on the other side. Alice was first to discover that Lack instead of absorbing everything, as Dr. Soft predicted, only absorbed certain items that seemed more conceptual. It took Alice's keys but not a paperclip. The only rule was if Lack choose to refuse an object once, it would forever refuse to consume that object.
The physicists in Coombs's lab become obsessed with Lack, which appears to have its own personality and preferences. Alice develops a personal relationship with the artificial intelligence that they have created, while Philip becomes jealous of their relationship.
Philip begins to get involved after B-84, a laboratory animal (cat) enters Lack. This consumption of B-84 causes a campus wide protest. In an attempt to impress Alice, Philip breaks up the protest by giving a speech about how a single cat being destroyed is minimal and their efforts would better spent on larger problems in the world. Instead of impressing Alice, she becomes defensive of Lack and locks herself in its chamber.
After a night of drinking, Philip comes back to his apartment to see that Dr. Soft has brought Alice there. She is asleep but Dr. Soft suspects that she may have tried to enter Lack and that she is no longer capable of running experiments on Lack. This causes Dr. Soft to divide Lack's time up among capable people. He does not want to interrupt Alice's research so he gives her time but asks Philip to monitor her. He also claims a portion of Lack's time for himself, his graduate students, and an Italian physics team headed by Carmo Braxia. Later on Philip also gets Dr. De Tooth to also have his part in studying Lack.
Despite all of the new people studying Lack, still very little progress is being made both on the grounds of explaining Lack and in restoring Philip and Alice's relationship. The undergraduates build a device out of only things Lack consumes and try to feed it to Lack but Lack refuses it. Alice tries to give Lack pictures of herself but even those are refused. De Tooth tries to enter Lack himself and fails. Even the Italian Physicist seem to be lost, that is until Braxia tells Philip his theory. He claims Lack is a new universe that doesn't have intelligent life. He says that because of the strong anthropic principle, a universe cannot exist if there isn't conscious life to observe it. Since Lack does not contain any conscious life it clings to the our reality that does. The personality it developed was that of the first conscious person it encountered, Alice. What it absorbed was what she liked.
With his new knowledge, and in a state of drunkenness, Philip sets out to be the first lover in history to ever have a definitive answer as to whether or not he is loved back. He enters Lacks chamber and slides himself into Lack. He wakes up the next morning realizing he is no longer in the universe he was the night before.The ground was ball bearings and wool, buildings were made of clay and bowling shoe leather, and the fountain at the entrance of campus was made of aluminum foil and was filled with pistachio ice cream. After retrieving B-84 as proof of the universe, Philip heads back to Lack and climbs in. This time however, instead of going back to reality as he expected, he entered a new universe that had no light. Evan and Garth, two blind men who had also climbed into Lack, helped him once again climb into Lack but this time instead of entering a new universe he merges and becomes one with Lack.
The novel deals thematically with many of the philosophical issues pertaining to modern quantum physics, as well as human interaction with artificial intelligence.
There has been news around interest in adapting Jonathan Lethem's novel into a feature film, which would be under the direction of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Steven Zaillian would be producing, along with his production company Film Rites.
Reviewers considered the book a light read that was entertaining. Steven E. Alford says "It embodies a distilled, gentle, silly look at the world". [2] Another common agreement is that Lethem defies the boundaries in traditional genres. Glen Engel-Cox points out that instead of like a traditional science fiction, focusing on a "driven scientist in that endless pursuit of knowledge", As She Climbed Across the Table focuses on "someone like us [a science fiction reader], intrigued by the type but not one of them himself." [3] It received some criticism for inaccuracies in scientific principles. Eric Weeks compares it to The Tao of Physics with its "muddled attempts to be philosophical about quantum mechanics which fail to get the physics correct." [4] He also talks about how it contains bad physics jokes that he finds distracting.
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